Lexi Ribarchak has an unquestioned passion for softball. She’s been a member of the Elizabeth Forward varsity team since her freshman year, with expectations high for the then 14-year-old infielder.

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But the excitement was unexpectedly grounded when she noticed something was wrong.

“Whenever I was running, my leg just started hurting really bad and I showed my mom the one day and she looked at it and it just started turning in,” Ribarchak told Pittsburgh’s Action Sports reporter Justin Rose. “And then a couple months later, it was almost in the back of my leg, so we decided to go to a doctor.”

“They thought it was either an ACL thing or an LCL, where the tendon was pulling the kneecap, because then we started seeing her kneecap rotating a little bit,” her mom, Candy Ribarchak, said. “And within three months’ time, her kneecap was in the back.”

The condition Lexi had is known as miserable malalignment syndrome. It affects just one in 600,000 people, and miserable doesn’t even begin to describe the surgery needed to correct it.

“I had to get my femur cut in half, a rod put down it, four incisions on the side of my thigh. And that twisted my foot around, so I had to get my ankle cut on the top and twisted back around and pins on the inside and outside,” Lexi said.

Throughout her nine months of rehab, she often turned to the sport she loved as motivation. After a year she was ready to rejoin her teammates on the field. That was until she was hit with another curveball: She’d need the same surgery on her other leg. But that didn’t deter her.

“Softball isn’t everything, it really isn’t, but to her, that’s all she loves to do. She doesn’t hang out with friends at night. She doesn’t go and do things. She loves to play softball and that’s it,” said Candy Ribarchak.

“It’s just an inspiration to all the other ballplayers that she still wanted to be part of the team,” said Lexi’s coach, Harry Rutherford. “Most kids would’ve probably just given up and not worked hard to come back and play, but Lexi had different plans on that.”

But Lexi stayed positive by realizing that it always could be worse.

“I just want to be able to inspire people that you can get through anything if you just put your mind through it,” she said.